Myung Myung Baek Baek, Educational Graphic Novels

ABOUT THE BOOK

The academic terminologies are often difficult to comprehend. However, if you know the root of the term, it makes a lot of sense! (I found that this holds true not only in Korean but English) Together with Boram Park, a good friend of mine from high school and a great designer, we wrote two educational graphic novels on Geography for high school students.

Based with this idea, we wrote two educational graphic novels. First, we made a list of words from geography that are necessary for high school curriculum. Then each word is explained in a form of comic strips. The book also features summary of each chapters from high school text book.

The first editions are all sold out, and we have been getting amazing feedback that made all the hard work worth it.

Book (cover)

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^ This is the cover of the second book

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^ Sample page of a book. Each book contains over 100 words.

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^ Online presence. We use a blog to directly communicate with our readers. We also uploaded our graphics to Korean version of Wikipedia to share what we learned to the greater community.

Samsung. Social Phonebook

TIMELINE

December 2008 ~ December 2009

BRIEF

“Integration of social networking services into the mobile operating system will enable mobile devices to function as true social hubs.”

Based on this premise, I led a series of intensive and exciting ideation sessions resulting in a number of prototypes that were proposed and developed. We designed a system wherein each contact’s page serves as a communication hub where you can see all your calls, SMS, and e-mail from that person, then touch the Activities tab to see their Facebook and Twitter updates, or go to the Media tab to see all their photos and videos. Integrated phonebook is now part of Samsung Social Hub – available for all Samsung mobile devices with TouchWiz3.0, the 3rd generation of Samsung touch phone UX platform.

TEAM

New Business Development and Incubation Team  (A multidisciplinary team to focus on 3~5 year development under product planning group for Samsung Mobile)

Reimagining Phonebook

This was my first task at Samsung in 2008 when social network service was the most popular subject in digital world. My team wanted to explore how phones facilitate people’s connected lives. I collected examples of different types of networking services and social experiments, and shared with our team and the design team.

Phonebook is where you see list of your contacts, but it is is not serving as a jumping point to connect to them nor providing me the best representation of the collection. Can we re-imagine phonebook?

Ideation & Concept Development

To explore this connected phonebook idea, I ran a design exercise with my team

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^ Design exercises

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^ Ideation session for initial concept creation

Final Screens

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^ The findings of the design execises were shared with design team who later designed Integrated phonebook as part of social hub and TouchWiz 3.0 (Samsung smartphone platform)

Press

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^ It was presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2010 and many media covered Samsung connected phonebook with great reviews.

Samsung. New Concept Development

TIMELINE

November 2008 ~ March 2010

BRIEF

New concept generation for the smartphones in near future through human centered design process.

At Samsung mobile i was in the product planning team envisioning future devices for upcoming years.  Technology improvements, hardware manufacture and developments in advanced physical user interaction must all be taken into account in addition to software improvements, service integrations, and business initiatives.

The team embarked on the project by observing users, and analyzing consumer and technology trends to conceptualize future trends. Based on the conceptual model, design principles are laid out and ideas are generated. Through scenario building and scenario scoring, a final product concept was proposed. After several months of prototype development, working prototype was shown at Mobile World Congress 2010 at Barcelona.

 

TEAM

New Business Development and Incubation Team  (A multidisciplinary team to focus on 3~5 year development under product planning group for Samsung Mobile)

 New Concept Development

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^ Mockup image for prototype.

Process

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^ Technology and consumer trend mapping exercise

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RESULT

The package of concepts did not make to the market. However, components of our concept became part of other software or hardware products in Samsung. More importantly, the methodologies we used is now more spread in the organization. I am now seeing products that were developed within our team coming out as a commercial product in the market. (Galaxy Edge)

Samsung. Media Player for Connected World

TIMELINE

November 2008 ~ March 2010

BRIEF

The way people are consuming media has been changed immensely with digital technology. Web already has changed the way we read, listen to music and enjoys video on desktop in many ways, and the mobile technology is going to change it even more. The consumption can be described as snacking as opposed to having a meal. The access to and the consumption of media requires much less effort and it happens much more frequently. Our team explored how media player should evolve when the network and mobile technology advances even further.

TEAM

New Business Development and Incubation Team  (A multidisciplinary team to focus on 3~5 year development under product planning group for Samsung Mobile)

Future Product Design Team

Re-imagine Media Player for Connected World

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